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Chairman Tim Holden:
What's the PLCB hiding? |
As
reported Sunday in the Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review the PLCB, an agency with
no business reason to hide anything (since they have
no competitors), has not been very open or honest when dealing with their
bosses — that
us, the citizens of Pennsylvania. After all, that's what their supporters keep telling us, that we're the
owners of a
"valuable public asset." Shouldn't the "owners" be able to
ask questions and get answers?
That's
not what happened, according to the
Trib's reporter, Kari Andren; instead,
the LCB instructed their press secretary to
delay the release of such information by
forcing the
Trib to go through Right To Know channels:
The agency's board members directed a press secretary not to provide basic information about a former employee, such as dates of service, job title and salary, unless the reporter filed a formal request — a move that could have delayed the release by more than a month, the emails obtained under the state's Right to Know law show.
“We have to watch what we ‘give' her regarding employees without going through the Right to Know channels, even if it is public information,” board member Michael Negra wrote in a Sept. 23 email.
“Agree,” Chairman Tim Holden responded the same day.
LCB spokesperson Elizabeth Brassell said the agency, “
fully respects and
supports the release of public information to interested parties.” But
Erik Arneson, head of the agency charged
with overseeing the state's open records act, said the board members'
actions were
not in keeping with the intent of the law. “The Right to Know (RTK) Law was not designed to be a
tool used by agencies to
delay access to clearly public information,” Arneson said.
More proof of this use of delaying tactics is the
now 111 days over which the PLCB has
refused to release their
yearly financial statements. Some were
verbally stated during the Ross hearings
over two months ago, but so far
nothing has shown up on paper or online. If the PLCB were a "real" business, they
would have had to release their yearly statement before the first quarter earnings statement. However, the PLCB doesn't update the citizens with quarterly statements. Why not? It's a
painfully simple answer: they
aren't a real business, and never have been, and
never will be.
Melissa Melewsky, a media lawyer with the
Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, agreed that the LCB's approach
doesn't follow the spirit of the
open records law, or Gov. Tom Wolf's call for
government transparency.
Wolf
said he was “confident in Chairman Holden's ability to continue to
make the LCB more transparent,” and the previous Chairman (and still
current board member) Skip Brion has
said, “This is a state agency; we should
be as transparent as possible.” Apparently he has
changed his mind.
This is not the
first time the board has used RTK to
delay, or has
done things in the dark that should have been in the sunshine of public scrutiny. Years of
notational votes (where the Board members meet informally and off the record to make decisions, and then only vote on 'that thing we talked about' in official meetings) and
vague to non-existent board meeting information have keep the "owners" (
you and I) in the dark about the working of the PLCB.
Who knows, if the public
were privy to the
machinations of the State Store System, we may never have had
wine kiosks, or $66 million in computer system
cost overruns, or paid over
$4 million for an out-of-state firm to come up with that snappy "Fine Wine And Good Spirits"
branding. All money well spent, I'm sure...once the real facts finally come out in a few years, the brilliance of it all will shine clear.
Or not.
This is not the
first time the PLCB has been publicly charged with ignoring the intent of state law; this is not the
first time they've lied by omission. This is not the
first time they've delayed the release of reports on their performance. So we have to ask:
why the delay this time? We see the
smoke, what is the
fire that the PLCB is trying to hide
while privatization is still a very real possibility in the Legislature? We urge the
Trib to keep digging —
faster, if possible — and encourage the reporters at the
Inquirer,
PennLive, the
Daily Record, and the
Post-Gazette to do the same. Because we the citizens —
the owners —
need this story to come out before privatization slips away. It's clear that the PLCB feels
threatened by it; that's enough reason to dig out
the truth.
The time to privatize is now.
